Many Roman Catholic and mainstream Protestant scholars contest that this has no basis in fact.
Additional Protestant scholars are in agreement.
Many Protestant scholars accept the traditional story of Peter's martyrdom in Rome.
Last August he and five other Protestant scholars issued a controversial new translation of parts of the Bible.
Protestant scholars since the Reformation have generally believed that Jesus was setting his teaching over against false interpretations of the Law current at the time.
The new perspective has, by and large, been an internal debate among Protestant scholars.
There are other Protestant scholars who also partially defend the historical Catholic position about "Rock."
As in the case of several other northern Protestant scholars, general content or scientific controversy was less at issue than religious conviction.
One such was a young Protestant scholar called Samuel Ferguson who studied the language privately and discovered its poetry, which he began to translate.
Polls show, for instance, that a majority of Catholic and Protestant scholars believe that there is no real conflict between science and religion.